The Atlantic Times, January 2011
During the Hitler era, the German Foreign Office was a “criminal organization,” not a “site of opposition” that exercised “tough, sustained resistance” to the Nazi regime. That’s how Historian Eckart Conze summarized the findings of a new book that has caused quite a stir among Germany’s foreign policy elite. The “resistance” claim comes from a brochure still being published by the ministry as late as 1979.
“Das Amt und die Vergangenheit: Deutsche Diplomaten im Dritten Reich und in der Bundesrepublik” (The Office and the Past: German Diplomats in the Third Reich and the Federal Republic) was commissioned five years ago by then-Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer. A panel of five distinguished historians, including Conze, wrote and edited the work. Since its publication, politicians, diplomats, historians and other commentators have resumed an old debate about whether a ministry or at least some of its staff could have remained “clean” during the Nazi dictatorship.
The dispute is difficult to comprehend since even the most shocking facts in the book came to light long ago in other publications: an expenses claim for an official trip whose purpose was given as “liquidation of the Jews”; or the involvement of Ernst von Weizsäcker, at the time State Secretary in the Foreign Office, the father of former Federal President Richard von Weizsäcker. Yet for decades following World War II, the main defense offered by hundreds of more or less culpable officials seeking to rejoin a new foreign service now devoted to the cause of democracy, was that the Foreign Office, of all places, was a hotbed of resistance during the Nazi period.
The most rudimentary math suffices to debunk the claims that so many functionaries and dignitaries opposed the regime: In the two decades after the war, cynics have observed, these “members of the resistance” actually outnumbered the population of Nazi Germany. The “Führer Theory” – an attempt to replace the concept of German collective guilt with one of collective innocence – proved untenable.
By now practically every aspect of the Nazi state has been minutely researched, and all the results are clear: Broad sections of the elite fundamentally supported Hitler’s goals of annulling the “disgraceful” Treaty of Versailles, retaking Saarland and other “lost” territories of the old Reich, and re-arming Germany. Few members of the establishment abandoned their loyalty to the state as a result of the Nazis’ abhorrent ideology – an ideology that went far beyond the goals of the Versailles revisionists. In fact, the university-educated youth born after 1910 gave their careers the highest priority.
In postwar Germany, the print media has been instrumental in lifting the veil of silence on this issue. Beginning in 1972, the weeklies Der Spiegel and Die Zeit uncovered a series of shocking death sentences imposed by former naval judge Hans Filbinger, who had become the Christian Democrat state premier of Baden-Württemberg. Playwright Rolf Hochhuth later successfully defended his right to call Filbinger an “abominable jurist” in public, and in 1978, the legal scholar, Ingo Müller, documented “the unexamined past of our justice system.”
The journalist Ernst Klee shed light on “Auschwitz, Nazi Doctors and Their Victims.” Working with historians, other journalists debunked the myth that the Wehrmacht, the regular German army, did not commit the kind of crimes perpetrated by the SS, the Gestapo and other Nazi units.
They exposed companies that made huge profits making weapons or Zyklon B gas; identified architects who planned and built for Hitler as well as artists who painted, wrote or filmed for him and athletes who vied for victory in the name of “Führer, Volk und Vaterland.”
Nor did the media neglect to point out that the annihilation of European Jewry would hardly have been possible without the compliant services of the country’s rail operators or that civil servants diligently managed the Holocaust.
Yet while historians and journalists researched and publicized every mote in the eyes of the others, these two professions overlooked the beam in their own.
Until well into the 1990s, staffers on the democratic newspapers founded with the assistance and guidance of the Western occupying powers never asked where their bosses learned the tools of their trade. On the 50th anniversary of the first democratic newspaper in the US occupation zone, the labor union paper “journalist” wrote: “Ex-Nazis had no chance.” That’s how it should have been, but the truth was different. The founding editorial staff of nearly every West German newspaper included ex-propagandists who had worked for Goebbels. Even at the flagship papers of the Americans and the British, Die Neue Zeitung and Die Welt, former Nazis were on the staff from the very beginning.
For a long time, historians also stayed away from the subject of their profession’s own past. Not even Hans Mommsen, the 80-year-old authority on National Socialism dared broach the subject. He certainly was unable to objectively judge his father, also a historian. “Father tried to do what he could,” was the son’s thoroughly unscholarly reply to questions. Others who were allowed to go on teaching were “far more deeply implicated,” he observed.
The authors of the new history of Germany’s diplomatic service in the Nazi era come to an unmistakeable conclusion: “In word, thought and deed, the ministry acted in the name of the regime.” The same applies to every leadership and administrative level of the totalitarian system. Most Germans accept the argument that the colossal failure of the establishment made Nazism possible in the first place. That some members of today’s elite, many of them descended of the ranks of the old leadership, still try to gloss over this fact may be only human. But it is not acceptable.